Archive for the 'Careerism' category

The latest Journal Citation Reports has been released, updating us on the latest JIF for our favorite journals. New for this year is....

.....drumroll.......

provision of the distribution of citations per cited item. At least for the 2017 year.

The data ... represent citation activity in 2017 to items published in the journal in the prior two years.

This is awesome! Let's drive right in (click to enlarge the graphs). The JIF, btw is 5.970.

Oh, now this IS a pretty distribution, is it not? No nasty review articles to muck it up and the "other" category (editorials?) is minimal. One glaring omission is that there doesn't appear to be a bar for 0 citations, surely some articles are not cited. This makes interpretation of the article citation median (in this case 5) a bit tricky. (For one of the distributions that follows, I came up with the missing 0 citation articles constituting anywhere from 17 to 81 items. A big range.)

Still, the skew in the distribution is clear and familiar to anyone who has been around the JIF critic voices for any length of time. Rare highly-cited articles skew just about every JIF upward from what your mind things, i.e., that that is the median for the journal. Still, no biggie, right? 5 versus 5.970 is not all that meaningful. If your article in this journal from the past two years got 4-6 citations in 2017 you are doing great, right there in the middle.

Let's check another Journal....

Ugly. Look at all those "Other" items. And the skew from the highly-cited items, including some reviews, is worse. JIF is 11.982 and the article citation median is 7. So among other things, many authors are going to feel like they impostered their way into this journal since a large part of the distribution is going to fall under the JIF. Don't feel bad! Even if you got only 9-11 citations, you are above the median and with 6-8 you are right there in the hunt.

Final entry of the day:

Not too horrible looking although clearly the review articles contribute a big skew, possibly even more than the second journal where the reviews are seemingly more evenly distributed in terms of citations. Now, I will admit I am a little surprised that reviews don't do even better compared with primary review articles. It seems like they would get cited more than this (for both of these journals) to me. The article citation mean is 4 and the JIF is 6.544, making for a slightly greater range than the first one, if you are trying to bench race your citations against the "typical" for the journal.

The first takeaway message from these new distributions, viewed along with the JIF, is that you can get a much better idea of how your articles are fairing (in your favorite journals, these are just three) compared to the expected value for that journal. Sure, sure we all knew at some level that the distribution contributing to JIF was skewed and that median would be a better number to reflect the colloquial sense of typical, average performance for a journal.

The other takeaway is a bit more negative and self-indulgent. I do it so I'll give you cover for the same.

The fun game is to take a look at the articles that you've had rejected at a given journal (particularly when rejection was on impact grounds) but subsequently published elsewhere. You can take your citations in the "JCR" (aka second) year of the two years after it was published and match that up with the citation distribution of the journal that originally rejected your work. In the past, if you met the JIF number, you could be satisfied they blew it and that your article indeed had impact worthy of their journal. Now you can take it a step farther because you can get a better idea of when your article beat the median. Even if your actual citations are below the JIF of the journal that rejected you, your article may have been one that would have boosted their JIF by beating the median.

Still with me, fellow axe-grinders?

Every editorial staff I've ever seen talk about journal business in earnest is concerned about raising the JIF. I don't care how humble or soaring the baseline, they all want to improve. And they all want to beat some nearby competitors. Which means that if they have any sense at all, they are concerned about decreasing the uncited dogs and increasing the articles that will be cited in the JCR year above their JIF. Hopefully these staffs also understand that they should be beating their median citation year over year to improve. I'm not holding my breath on that one. But this new publication of distributions (and the associated chit chat around the campfire) may help with that.

Final snark.

I once heard someone concerned with JIF of a journal insist that they were not "systematically overlooking good papers" meaning, in context, those that would boost their JIF. The rationale for this was that the manuscripts they had rejected were subsequently published in journals with lower JIFs. This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Of course most articles rejected at one JIF level eventually get published down-market. Of course they do. This has nothing to do with the citations they eventually accumulate. And if anything, the slight downgrade in journal cachet might mean that the actual citations slightly under-represent what would have occurred at the higher JIF journal, had the manuscript been accepted there. If Editorial Boards are worried that they might be letting bigger fish get away, they need to look at the actual citations of their rejects, once published elsewhere. And, back to the story of the day, those actual citations need to be compared with the median for article citations rather than the JIF.

I know this is a little weird for the segments of my audience that are facing long odds even to land a faculty job and for those junior faculty who are worried about tenure. Why would a relatively secure Professor look for a job in a different University? Well.....reasons.

As is typical, the thread touched on the question of why Universities won't work harder in advance to keep their faculty so delightfully happy that they would never dream of leaving.

I don't think matching a start up was the major consideration for these folks. Investment in people and morale by an institution is important.

Eventually I mentioned my theory of how Administration views retention of their faculty.

I think Administration (and this is not just academics, I think this applies pretty broadly) operates from the suspicion that workers always complain and most will never do anything about it. I think they suppose that for every 10 disgruntled employees, only 5 will even bother to apply elsewhere. Of these maybe three will get serious offers. Ultimately only one will leave*.

So why invest in 10 to keep 1?

This, anyway, is what I see as motivating much of the upper management thinking on what appear to be inexplicably wasteful faculty departures.

Reality is much more nuanced.

I think one of the biggest mistakes being made is that by the time a last-ditch, generally half-arsed retention ploy is attempted it can be psychologically too late. The departing faculty member is simply too annoyed at the current Uni and too dazzled by the wooing from the new Uni to let any retention offer sway their feelings. The second biggest mistake is that if there is an impression created that "everybody is leaving" and "nobody is being offered reasonable retention" this can spur further attempts to exit the building before the roof caves in.

Yes, I realize some extremely wealthy private Universities all covered in Ivy have the $$ to keep all their people happy all of the time. This is not in any way an interesting case. Most Universities have to be efficient. Spending money on faculty that are going to stay anyway may be a waste, better used elsewhere. Losing too many faculty that you've spent startup costs on is also inefficient.

So how would you strike the right balance if you were Dean at a R1 University solidly in the middle of the pack with respect to resources?
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*Including by method of bribing one or more of the "serious offers" crowd to stay via the mysteries of the RetentionPackageTM

The men in the lab would read the Victoria’s Secret catalog at lunch in the break room. I could only wear baggy sweatshirts and turtlenecks to lab because when I leaned over my bench, the men would try to look down my shirt. Then came the targeted verbal harassment of the most crude nature

a scientist at a company I wanted to work for expressed interest in my research at a conference. ... When I got to the restaurant, he was 100% drunk and not interested in talking about anything substantive but instead asked personal questions, making me so uncomfortable I couldn’t network with his colleagues. I left after only a few minutes, humiliated and angry that he misled about his intentions and that I missed the chance to network with people actually interested in my work

Someone on the Twitters was asking for ideas about what to say in response to faculty that say, dismissively, that other faculty members are "diversity hires". The implication, stated or not by such folk, is that persons of color, or of nonXY chromosomal identity, are clearly inferior merely because of such identities.

In context of prospective new faculty during a hiring cycle, the VeryConcerned person often asserts that they are only concerned with keeping up the standards of the department.

"Can't have all these inferior diversity hires dragging us down, chaps! Hrm, hrm."

My thought is this.

In science, the young, new hires are always better than the department's current average. They have more cutting edge techniques, fresher ideas, less historical baggage and/or likely better collaborative relationships. They are not yet burned out, quite the contrary.

So the VeryConcernedColleague can rest at ease. The new hire is going to improve the Department, no matter who is hired out of the Long List of reasonably attractive candidates.

It is indubitably better for the postdoctoral training stint if the prospective candidate visits the laboratory before either side commits. The prospective gets a chance to see the physical resources, gets a chance for very specific and focused time with the PI and above all else, gets a chance to chat with the lab's members.

The PI gets a better opportunity to suss out strengths and weaknesses of the candidate, as do the existing lab members. Sometimes the latter can sniff things out that the prospective candidate does not express in the presence of the PI.

These are all good things and if you prospective trainees are able to visit a prospective training lab it is wise to take advantage.

If memory serves the triggering twittscussion for this post started with the issue of delayed reimbursement of travel and the difficulty some trainees have in floating expenses of such travel until the University manages to cut a reimbursement check. This is absolutely an important issue, but it is not my topic for today.

The discussion quickly went in another direction, i.e. if it is meaningful to the trainee if the PI "won't pay for the prospective to visit". The implication being that if a PI "won't" fly you out for a visit to the laboratory, this is a bad sign for the future training experience and of course all prospectives should strike that PI off their list.

This perspective was expressed by both established faculty and apparent trainees so it has currency in many stages of the training process from trainee to trainer.

It is underinformed.

I put "won't" in quotes above for a reason.

In many situations the PI simply cannot pay for travel visits for recruiting postdocs.

They may appear to be heavily larded with NIH research grants and still do not have the ability to pay for visits. This is, in the experience of me and others chiming in on the Twitts, because our institutional grants management folks tell us it is against the NIH rules. There emerged some debate about whether this is true or whether said bean counters are making an excuse for their own internal rulemaking. But for the main issue today, this is beside the point.

Some PIs cannot pay for recruitment travel from their NIH R01(s).

Not "won't". Cannot. Now as to whether this is meaningful for the training environment, the prospective candidate will have to decide for herself. But this is some fourth level stuff, IMO. PIs who have grants management which works at every turn to free them from rules are probably happier than those that have local institutional policies that frustrate them. And as I said at the top, it is better, all else equal, when postdocs can be consistently recruited with laboratory visits. But is the nature of the institutional interpretation of NIH spending rules a large factor against the offerings of the scientific training in that lab? I would think it is a very minor part of the puzzle.

There is another category of "cannot" which applies semi-independently of the NIH rule interpretation- the PI may simply not have the cash. Due to lack of a grant or lack of a non-Federal pot of funds, the PI may be unable to spend in the recruiting category even if other PIs at the institution can do so. Are these meaningful to the prospective? Well the lack of a grant should be. I think most prospectives that seek advice about finding a lab will be told to check into the research funding. It is kind of critical that there be enough for whatever the trainee wants to accomplish. The issue of slush funds is a bit more subtle but sure, it matters. A PI with grants and copious slush fundes may offer a better resourced training environment. Trouble is, that this comes with other correlated factors of importance. Bigger lab, more important jet-setting PI...these are going to be more likely to have extra resources. So it comes back to the usual trade-offs and considerations. In the face of that it is unclear that the ability to pay for recruiting is a deciding factor. It is already correlated with other considerations the prospective is wrestling with.

Finally we get to actual "will not". There are going to be situations where the PI has the ability to pay for the visit but chooses not to. Perhaps she has a policy never to do so. Perhaps he only pays for the top candidates because they are so desired. Perhaps she does this for candidates when there are no postdocs in the lab but not when there are three already on board. Or perhaps he doesn't do it anymore because the last three visitors failed to join the lab*.

Are those bad reasons? Are they reasons that tell the prospective postdoc anything about the quality of the future training interaction?

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*Extra credit: Is it meaningful if the prospective postdoc realizes that she is fourth in line, only having been invited to join the lab after three other people passed on the opportunity?

An extended discussion is going on and there are a few things of interest to me that are emerging.

What IS a "staff scientist"? Does it have a defined role? How is it used both formally by institutions and in less formal career-expectation space? How is it viewed by the hiring PI? How is it viewed by postdocs?

Is it, or should it be, a mere evolution of a postdoc after a certain interval of time (e.g., 5 years)?

Is it, or should it be, in part a job-job where a person is hired to do one sciencey thing (generate data from this assay)?

Is it, or should it be, a job where the person "merely" does as the PI instructs at all times?

Does it come with supervisory responsibilities? Is part of the deal to remove this person from ever having to consider grant-getting?

Is permanence of the job in a way that is not the case with postdocs an implied or explicit condition of the job title?

I recently attended a scientific meeting with which I've had an uncomfortable relationship for years. When I first heard about the topic domain and focus of this meeting as a trainee I was amazed. "This is just the right home for me and my interests in science", I thought. And, scientifically this was, and still is, the case.

I should love this meeting and this academic society.

This has not been the case, very likely because of the demographics of the society (guess) in addition to a few other....lets call them unusual academic society tics.

This year was a distinct improvement. It isn't here yet but I can see a youth wave about to crash into the shore. This swell of younger scientists (stretching from postdoc to nearly-tenured) looks more like modern science to me. Demographically, and on many dimensions.

I recently attended a scientific meeting during which it was made clear that their prize for young investigators had an age cutoff of 50 or younger.

Now the award was not literally titled "for Young Investigators" as so many are, but the context was clear. A guy who looks phenotypically like a solidly mid-career, even approaching-senior, was described as a "rising star" by the award presenter.

This is ridiculous.

It is more of this creeping infantilization of generations of scientists by the preceding one (Boomers) or two (preWar) generations. The generations who were Full Professors by age 40.

This is all of a part with grant reviews that wring hands over the "risk" of handing an R01 over to a 30 year old. Or a 38 year old.

I think we need to resist this.

Hold the line at 40 years of age on early-career or young-investigator awards. If your society is such that it only starts the awards at mid-career, make this clear. Call them "established stars" instead of "rising stars".